SOUTH SHORE WONDERS: Glastonbury Abbey, Hingham

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Lane Lambert The Patriot Ledger @llambert_ledger

HINGHAM - Most days, the shaded, rolling grounds of Glastonbury Abbey on Route 228 to Hull are quiet except for a few visitors and the occasional sight of a Benedictine monk in a black habit.

The abbey isn’t always so empty. Tens of thousands have been there for retreats, lectures and outdoor concerts over the decades. But the 10 monks who live at the former summer estate are quick to explain that those programs are not the reason they’re there.

“Our primary work is prayer,” said Brother David Coakley, the abbey’s choirmaster, organist and unofficial historian. “We chant the divine offices five or six times a day. Anything else we do has to fit in those parameters.”

That has been the practice since St. Benedict started his first monastery in the early 6th century. It sounds cloistered, but “anything else” has continually expanded over the decades – and as visitors discover, the monks are as devoted to hospitality as they are to the vigils, lauds, vespers and compline.

“We answered a call for the people around us,” Brother David said. “After the prayers, meeting people is the thing I like the most,” said Brother Daniel Walters, a West Quincy native and former teacher who’s been at the abbey since 1973.

On a recent day, a scattering of visitors included Marilyn and Frank McCue of Rockland. They savored the cool air and silence of the church sanctuary, and briefly chatted with the two monks at the grotto.

“The grotto is the most wonderful place,” Frank McCue said.

Day in and day out, individuals and couples can also walk the small labyrinth, sit at a “peace pole,” and take the path up to the 70-foot, stone observation tower that the property’s past owner built. Anyone can join the monks for the daily Eucharist. Small groups can share a silent dinner with them.

A sizable group of lay volunteers helps the monks tend a community garden and gather the produce, which is donated to Hull’s Wellspring social services agency and other food pantries. There are bee hives and a family of goats, too, brought in by the abbey’s longtime chef to produce honey and cheese.

Brother David, who’s from Flushing, N.Y., said the volunteers are part of “our extended community,” along with those who come for personal or group retreats year after year.

Retreat regulars are from as near as eastern Massachusetts and as far away as Montana. A group of Roman Catholic priests from Philadelphia has made retreats for 35 years.

In decades past, most new retreat visitors learned about the abbey when a family member or friend sent them a Mass Guild prayer-enrollment card. “Now they find us online,” Brother David said – at glastonburyabbey.org.

The abbey now includes 40 acres and eight buildings, and it probably wouldn’t be in Hingham if the late Cardinal Richard Cushing hadn’t recruited men’s religious orders to the South Shore.

The Boston area and North Shore had numerous such orders in the 1950s, but the semi-rural South Shore didn’t. Then-Archbishop Cushing contacted numerous national orders, and the St. Benedict’s Abbey in Benet Lake, Wis., offered to establish a monastery.

The Benet Lake monks looked around and chose the 20-acre former Hingham summer estate of wool merchant William Skilton. Skilton, a bachelor, died in the early 1930s. Before the Benedictines purchased it, the estate had been an inn and dance parlor, bachelor officers’ quarters for the town’s World War II Navy ammunition depot, and a day camp.

The Benet Lake monks named the new monastery for the famous medieval English abbey that by tradition is associated with the King Arthur legends. (The original Glastonbury Abbey was closed by King Henry VIII in 1539.) Brother David said the abbey started with “five or six” monks who lived and worked in the residence and former carriage house.

Like all Benedictine monasteries, Glastonbury Abbey is self-supporting. In the beginning, the monks ran a Latin school for men who wanted to attend a seminary and needed the language to qualify. By the 1960s the school had 50 students, and the abbey included as many as 20 monks and a new, contemporary-style church built in 1962.

The retreat program opened in 1975, with the addition of rooms in a former nursing home just down the road. They bought a second nearby house in 1974, and in 2001 opened the Morcone Conference Center for lectures and other events, including family gatherings and wedding receptions.

A large private donation paid for the center’s design and construction. A new capital campaign will be launched in 2018, to raise money for renovations to the residential quarters, the refectory and the library. Meanwhile, the monks faithfully follow their order’s 1,500-year-old schedule.

The day the McCues dropped by from Rockland, Brother Daniel and Brother David headed back to the carriage house offices. There was more to do before they joined their fellow monks for the 5:15 p.m. vesper service, dinner and 7:45 compline. A new day was ahead, with new visitors sure to arrive.

“We’re always here,” Brother David said.

Lane Lambert may be reached at llambert@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @LLambert_Ledger.